You can't go home to Earth-Two again: The Young All-Stars

In the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC's All-Star Squadron was wound down and replaced by a new ongoing series, The Young All-Stars. Instead of focusing on established Golden Age characters, this focused on a group of largely original World War II-era characters, picking up from where All-Star Squadron had left off in early 1942. Some of the characters are vague analogues who were removed from the WWII era by the changes of the Crisis.

So there is:

• Arn "Iron" Munro, a strongman (sort of a Superman analogue)
• Flying Fox, a First Nations Canadian (a very loose Batman analogue, only in the sense that they're both spooky-looking flying creatures; his powers are all tribal mysticism stuff)
• Helena "Fury" Kosmatos, deriving her power from the Greek Furies (replacing the Golden Age Wonder Woman as the mother of Lyta "Fury" Trevor of Infinity, Inc.)
• Neptune "Neptune Perkins" Perkins, who has water powers (a preexisting character, but he had only appeared in two Golden Age stories before Roy Thomas picked him up for use in All-Star Squadron; kind of an Aquaman analogue)
• Danny "Dyna-Mite" Dunbar, who has explosion powers (the only one of these characters to actually have an ongoing feature during the Golden Age, he had been sidekick to TNT)
• Miya "Tsunami" Mishada, also with water powers (she appeared as a villain in All-Star Squadron)
• [joining the team later] Paula "Tigress" Brooks, a master of all weapons (eventually it's revealed that she'll go on to be the original Huntress, a villain who appeared opposite Wildcat in Sensation Comics, as well as opposite the Helena Wayne Huntress in the 1970s All Star Comics revival)

The problem is that I just never really cared about any of these characters. I don't think character is Roy Thomas's strong point, but on All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc., he was able to get there in the end; the All-Stars were a colorful lot who popped well, and the Infinitors started weak but became compelling. Is it because the All-Stars were (mostly) preexisting characters and the Infinitors closely tied to preexisting ones? Did Dann Thomas exert less influence on this series than on Infinity, Inc.? (My assumption, perhaps unfounded, is he comes up with the plots that reconcile forty-year old continuity errors, and she writes all the good character stuff and dialogue.)

Or is it the art? The more I read comics, the more I come to suspect things people perceive as "writing" problems are often art ones. If characters don't pop, is it because the writing is poor, or because the artists can't communicate character? I never really warmed to any of the series regular artists, and it went through a number of them. All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. were both blessed by Jerry Ordway, who went on to be a superstar, and other collaborators included standouts like Tony DeZuniga, Vince Colletta, and even, I must admit, Todd McFarlane. Young All-Stars didn't have such great artists, and the ones it did have were rarely constant; the first twelve issues had six different pencillers and six different inkers. The only one of the title's regular artists I'd ever heard of was Malcolm Jones III, who went from issue #19 of Young All-Stars in Dec. 1988 to issue #4 of obscure new title The Sandman in Apr. 1989. But being good is not the same as being a good fit, and you might guess someone well-suited to Neil Gaiman's milieu isn't well suited to Roy Thomas's, no matter how good he is.

The premise of Young All-Stars picks up from that of All-Star Squadron, chronicling a superhero-centric take on World War II. When it's good, it's when it's actually leaning into this; my favorite story line was Atom and Evil! (#21-25), a post-Crisis retelling of Superman vs. Wonder Woman. This did the kind of thing I always enjoyed in All-Star Squadron, take real history and refract it through the lens of the DC universe in a way that was pretty fun. I liked the incorporation of a supergroup made up of representatives of each of the Allies, especially Kuei, the Chinese demon. I would like to see more of him, but it looks like he was never used again after his final appearance in Young All-Stars #27. I also liked the way it played with Superman vs. Wonder Woman; at first it looks like it's going to be a beat-for-beat replay of that story (with, say, Fury in the Wonder Woman role) but then it goes off on its own direction. It did, alas, remove some of Gerry Conway's moral complexity.

But most of the time the series doesn't do this. I'm not sure why (various comments in the lettercol made me think it was a DC editorial directive, but also Roy Thomas seems to act like it's a creative choice at times). I think what really makes the Earth-Two/JSA stuff interesting, as I've said, is the sense of legacy and history, but that's largely lacking here.

There's not as much connection with real history as in All-Star Squadron, and there's not as much DC history, either, as Iron Munro, Flying Fox, Neptune Perkins, and Tsunami are all characters who didn't really have any connection to the present-day DC universe. Fury's daughter is one of my favorite Infinity, Inc. and Sandman characters, but I ended up often feeling like her mother was a potentially strong character rendered impotent by the stories told about her, which mostly revolve around 1) her powers being too strong for her and 2) whether she should date Iron Munro. You get little insight into Lyta Trevor by reading about Helena Kosmatos. (We never learn, as far as I know, what must be the thing we most want to learn about Helena: why did she give up baby Lyta and who was the father.)

Instead, the series often focuses on tying the DC universe into pre-superhero fiction. Iron Munro, for example, is revealed to be the son of Hugo Danner, the protagonist of the 1930 novel Gladiator by Philip Wylie (co-author of When Worlds Collide). Gladiator may have influenced Siegel and Shuster's conception of Superman, and so here Hugo Danner becomes the literal father of The Young All-Stars's Superman analogue. Similarly, Neptune Perkins is revealed to be the grandson of Arthur Gordon Pym, from the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, in a storyline that also takes in the vril (from The Coming Race, though Thomas doesn't seem to know this is the origin of the term because he never mentions it), Captain Nemo (establishing he was Pym!), and Frankenstein's creature! When Hugo Danner eventually appears, in the Sons of Dawn storyline, we learn he's taken refuge in the "lost world" of Arthur Conan Doyle fame, and there's even a relative of Professor Challenger involved.

As a concept, I think this is interesting. Superhero fiction is a genre that has pretty freely borrowed from other genres, and engaging with this more directly is a fun idea. Gladiator may have influenced superman, "lost tribe" narratives are a staple of superhero fiction, the X-Men's Savage Land is a pretty obvious riff on Doyle's Lost World, superhero fiction is full of Frankensteinesque mad scientists and Frankenstein's-creatureesque monsters. Why not make all this text instead of subtext?

Well, because if you're Roy Thomas, you're unable to do so in a way that's interesting. Young All-Stars doesn't really tell stories that use these connections; rather, it relates backstory that reveals them. The Arn Munro/Hugo Danner thing has an issue where basically Arn just reads Gladiator. The Dzyan Inheritance is the four-issue story where we learn about Neptune Perkins's ancestry-- and fully the first two and half issues are just people giving exposition! Does knowing his grandfather was Captain Nemo develop his character? It turns out, no; in fact, he barely contributes to the story. Sons of Dawn is the closest any of these tales come to have a present-day repercussion, but then the story is a bit of racist nonsense about how if American natives see an attractive white woman, they immediately begin with the pillaging to get ahold of her. Plus: will Arn be tempted to join his father as a genocidal dictator? Well, no, of course not.

The shame of it all is that there are some potentially interesting threads. Helena wants to be using her powers to liberate Greece, but can't because of the spell cast by Hitler. Tsunami changed sides-- but is now fighting for a nation that puts her parents in camps. Flying Fox is a "fish out of water" in the modern world. All of these bits have potential, but the series basically neglects them in favor of much less interesting stuff. Flying Fox may as well have not been in this series for all he ultimately contributed to it beyond being a body in fight scenes.

There were a couple neat storylines aside from Atom and Evil! I liked the journey into Project M, America's attempt to create monsters to use in the war; the "Meanwhile..." issue that showed what the rest of the All-Star Squadron was up to was a fun one; the Millennium tie-in issues were fun, and a good use of the Manhunters. But too often I sighed as I opened another issue.

I'll be curious to see if future JSA writers make use of Young All-Stars concepts going forward. Something I had totally forgotten (I guess because it didn't mean much to me at the time) is that Arn Munro is actually the grandfather of the Kate Spencer Manhunter; he would sleep with the Phantom Lady, and she gave the child up for adoption, who grew up to be Kate's dad. Arn even appeared in the Forgotten and Face Off storylines, but rereading my reviews of them, I liked the Golden Age aspect of them the least! I know Helena put in some more appearances that I will get to. But did Flying Fox, Neptune Perkins, and Tsunami amount to anything? I have this inkling the answer might be "no" but comics writers always surprise me by bringing back the most obscure of concepts. Clearly Marc Andreyko was a big Young All-Stars (and Infinity, Inc.) reader, so who else was?

This post is sixteenth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Gladiator. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)